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Corn dolly
Corn dollies or corn mothers are a form of straw work made as part of harvest customs of Europe before mechanization.
Before Christianisation, in traditional pagan European culture it was believed that the spirit of the corn (in modern American English, "corn" would be "grain") lived amongst the crop, and that the harvest made it effectively homeless. James Frazer devotes chapters in ''The Golden Bough'' to "Corn-Mother and Corn-Maiden in Northern Europe" (chs. 45-48) and adduces European folkloric examples collected in great abundance by the folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt. Among the customs attached to the last sheaf of the harvest were hollow shapes fashioned from the last sheaf of wheat or other cereal crops. The corn spirit would then spend the winter in this home until the "corn dolly" was ploughed into the first furrow of the new season. "Dolly" may be a corruption of "idol" or may have come directly from the Greek word ''eidolon (apparition)''; that which represents something else.
==Background==
James George Frazer discusses the Corn-mother and the Corn-maiden in Northern Europe, and the harvest rituals that were being practised at the beginning of the 20th century:
Many more customs are instanced by Frazer (see link). For example, the term "Old Woman" (Latin ''vetula'') was in use for such "corn dolls" among the Germanic pagans of Flanders in the 7th century, where Saint Eligius discouraged them from their old practices: "(not ) make vetulas, (little figures of the Old Woman), little deer or iotticos or set tables (the house-elf, compare Puck ) at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks (Yule custom )." Frazer writes: "In East Prussia, at the rye or wheat harvest, the reapers call out to the woman who binds the last sheaf, “You are getting the Old Grandmother....In Scotland, when the last corn was cut after Hallowmas, the female figure made out of it was sometimes called the Carlin or Carline, that is, the Old Woman."〔Frazer, ch. 45.〕
抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
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